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Language resources, including not only corpora but also lexicons, knowledge bases and ontologies, grammars, etc. support the development of language processing applications that are increasingly important to the global society. Substantial effort has been devoted to the creation of such resources for the world's major languages over the past decades, and new projects are developing similar resources for less widely-used languages. Some standards and best practices have emerged for representing and linking language corpora and annotations, efforts such as 'Global WordNet' and the development of framenets in multiple languages seek to create and link specific lexical and semantic resources across languages, and there are efforts to integrate such resources into general ontologies such as SUMO. As the need for cross-lingual studies and applications grows, it is increasingly important to develop resources in the world's languages that can be compared and linked, used and analyzed with common software, and that contain linguistic information for the same or comparable phenomena. We envision the eventual development of a 'global web' of language resources, wherein, for example, linguistically-annotated corpora in multiple languages are inter-linked via the use of common categories, or categories that are mapped to one another; resources such as wordnets and framenets are linked not only to versions in different languages, but also to each other; and common representations enable analysis and use of resources in different languages and of different types within available systems.

Paper Submission Deadline Extended to September 30, 2007

ICGL First International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources

The first international conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources will bring together designers, developers, and users of corpora and other language resources from across the globe, in order to:

- assess the state of the art in methods and schemes for resource representation, annotation, interlinkage, and access; - consider the requirements for (and obstacles to) multi-lingual and multi-modal interoperability and standardization; - consider the requirements for achieving interoperability among multi-lingual resources of different types, including corpora, lexicons, knowledge bases, ontologies, etc., as well as the systems and frameworks that enable their creation and exploitation; - consider the ways in which web technologies are and may be used to enable resource interoperability and inter- linkage; - work toward the definition of best practice guidelines and standards for language resource representation, annotation, and use that will enable interoperability; - consider means to map or harmonize linguistic information in order to better enable cross-lingual studies; - provide direction for developers of resources for less widely used languages; - promote collaboration and cooperation among developers of language resources across the globe; - consider ways to provide central or distributed access to language resources developed throughout the world.

Topics Paper submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

- multi-lingual and/or multi-modal language resources, with focus on the mechanisms enabling interoperability; - support for multi-linguality and multi-modality in systems/frameworks for resource creation, annotation, use, and access; - existing and proposed standards and best practice guidelines for language resources, including standards for linguistic annotations at any and all linguistics levels; - systems, frameworks, and architectures to support the development and exploitation of interoperable language resources; - evaluation of existing resources, systems and frameworks, and/or standards in terms of support for interoperability; - harmonization, integration, and/or linking of language resources, including corpora, wordnets, framenets, ontologies, etc.; - web-based technologies for resource interoperability, inter-linkage, and access; - interoperability of ontologies for language processing research; - support for multi-linguality, multi-culturality, and multi-modality.

In addition to full-length paper presentations, the Program Committeealso invites proposals for posters addressing any of the above topics.Posters describing existing or developing resources or tools that provide an assessment of needs and/or considerations for interoperabilityare especially encouraged.

Proceedings Accepted papers will be included in conference proceedings, to be published by City University Press, Hong Kong. A selection of outstanding conference presentations will be published in a special issue of the journal ''Language Resources and Evaluation''.